Sigma Tau Delta<\/a> is an international honor society for English majors at four-year colleges and universities. More than 600 papers were accepted in a variety of categories, and winners were announced during an awards ceremony on the final night after participants presented their work.<\/p>\nEnglish professor Margaret Oakes, Ph.D., Furman\u2019s Sigma Tau Delta faculty sponsor, also made the trip to Minnesota, and she wasn\u2019t surprised to see how well the school\u2019s representatives did considering the time they spent working with faculty members editing their entries and practicing their presentations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey read so professionally, and they answered the questions in a very professional, scholarly way,\u201d she said. \u201cThat just speaks a lot for both the quality of our students\u2019 work and the kind of attention that we pay to them that really helps them shine when they are in\u00a0a situation like this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Young\u2019s essay, \u201cPostmemory in Alison Bechdel\u2019s Fun Home<\/em>,\u201d sharply analyzes a memoir, written in an unusual graphic novel format, in which the protagonist attempts to come to grips with the death of her father soon after she told her parents she is a lesbian.<\/p>\nYoung originally wrote the paper her junior year for a critical and cultural theory class taught by Vincent Hausmann, Ph.D., and she worked with English professor Nicholas Radel, Ph.D., to cut the piece down from 5,000 words to the limit of 2,000 required for the convention.<\/p>\n
\u201c(Winning) feels awesome, and writing is what I like to do,\u201d Young, who came to Furman from Sarasota, Fla., after growing up in Connecticut, said. \u201cI was really interested in the topic and the book when I wrote\u00a0my paper\u2026 I felt more personally connected to it than I’ve felt with some of my other papers.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cWhy We Must Qualify Travel,\u201d Mellor combines lovely descriptive prose with jarring honesty to explore the deep and complex emotions resulting from having a fraternal twin sister who suffers from mental illness.<\/p>\n
\u201cGetting the\u00a0Honorable Mention\u00a0was really affirming. Shannon had just won first place \u2026 and we were all abuzz about it and I heard my name,\u201d Mellor, a native of Irvin, Calif., said. \u201cWe called it fourth place, which was really fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
A communication studies\/English double major, Mellor admits the prize has her rethinking her career path from a focus on marketing or public relations.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always loved to write, but that\u2019s not something I ever thought I would pursue \u2026 It\u2019s just something I\u2019m good at,\u201d she said. \u201cAfter my experience at the conference, my sights have expanded to a career\u00a0in\u00a0publishing or some kind of creative marketing with\u00a0more copy work. I\u2019m seeing where I could pursue writing a little more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bailey\u2019s piece, \u201cThis Side of the Sea,\u201d was entered in the highly competitive original short fiction category.<\/p>\n
\u201cCory did a great job, but there is more short fiction, quantity wise, at this conference than other things, so he was in a much larger pool of people,\u201d Oakes said. \u201cI thought he wrote a really strong story.\u201d<\/p>\n
For more on the 2016 International Convention, including a complete list of winners, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A small contingent of Furman writers took home a large haul of awards at the four-day Sigma Tau Delta International Convention held earlier this month in Minneapolis. Shannon Young \u201916, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":15751,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,51,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-communication-studies","category-english"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}